A new self-starting drainage method for slope stabilization and its application

Drainage is a cost-effective way to stabilize slopes. However, clogging has always been a factor that decreases the sustainability and efficiency of the drainage method in slope stabilization. A new drainage method utilizing the hydraulic principle is presented in this paper. A deterministic method, which is performed by integrated software, for evaluating the factor of safety (FOS) under the action of a given self-starting drainage design is proposed correspondingly. A framework for the optimized design of self-starting drainage is established, and the following steps are mainly included: The optimal dip angles of the inclined boreholes are determined by a plotting method; the optimal lengths of the permeable section of the inclined boreholes are determined based on uniform design and support vector machine; the concept of Pareto front is introduced to determine the most preferred design in design space considering multiple objectives including safety, cost, and drain effectiveness. The entire process is illustrated with a case study, the Qili landslide in Zhejiang Province, China.